A Hybrid Approach for Protecting Clinical and Genomic Data Using Lossless Stego-DNA Compression

Clinical data is the most valuable and sensitive asset about humans. While there are a variety of effective policies, processes, and regulations in place to secure patient information, privacy and security vulnerabilities in electronic health record (EHR) systems remain major concerns. In the domain of communication and digital security, cryptography and steganography techniques are the most commonly used to secure confidential data from unauthorized access. New domains for DNA-based cryptography and steganography are developed to enable data protection using DNA as a cover medium by utilizing its bio-molecular computational features and capacity. In this paper, many DNA-based steganography related studies have been discussed with the basic DNA-based steganography methodologies according to crucial security factors. Furthermore; an approach (Lossless Stego-DNA Compression for Securing Clinical Data), LSDC has been proposed that can improve most of the previous security vulnerabilities and achieving a greater level of security. The approach consists of three stages: DNA steganography, DNA compression, and image or video hiding. It could hide the sensitive clinical data in the DNA sequence without any modification on it. It could achieve a higher level of accuracy and performance on both directions (cipher and decipher). The experimental results showed that LSDC could successfully achieve an acceptable security and compression ratio (from 53.3 to 62%).